HOOT

Growing up in the early 2000’s Hoot was a classic movie watched around our house. I can’t honestly tell you if I read the book first or saw the movie first, but I will say I did enjoy the movie more than the book. Who can resist the adorable Cody Linley and Logan Lerman? I know I can’t! They were the epitome of my childhood crushes.

Now in the book, the characters are middle school age (around 7th grade) and in the movie they do attend middle school but may I say they give off more of the high school vibe (around 9th-10th grade). But I guess that's how movies work. They hire actors older than the actual age they are playing.

The book goes into more detail of the conflict between Roy and Dana Matherson, the school bully, and does describe more violence than the movie portrays.

The movie changes some parts of the story line a bit, for example, having Dana chase Roy into the construction site where as in the book Roy tells Dana there are cigarettes in the trailer that Dana then tries to go and steal. The movie also changes where Mullet Fingers lives. In the movie he lives on a boat in a boat yard and in the book he lives in the back of an ice cream truck in a junkyard. Another change is that while in the book Beatrice bites Roy's bike tire to give him an excuse for why he is late getting home, in the movie she pops it with a nail. Now those are all minor changes and there are a few others but none of them changed the overall storyline, they were just differences.

The biggest change that did bother me a little was the ending. The book ends with the kids protesting at the groundbreaking ceremony and Mullet Fingers burying himself in an owl burrow. Eventually the grown ups decide there are owls there that shouldn’t be buried for a pancake house and Mullet Fingers’ mom shows up and, after the protest, he is forced to go live with her again. He ends up running away and Roy never sees him again. In the movie, the kids show up to the groundbreaking showing the cops that the Mother Paula’s people don’t have the right paperwork to build there. They then ask the crowd to be quiet for a moment to see the owls they have been protecting. The owls come out of their burrows and basically everyone lives happily ever after. Well... maybe not the Mother Paula’s people.

I did feel that the movie was significantly funnier than the book. One of my favorite parts of the movie is when Officer Delinko’s patrol car windows get painted and he is punished by having to drive around a dinky little scooter/car/truck thing that I don’t even know what to call. In the book he is punished with two weeks of desk duty and gets his regular patrol car back right away.

Another amazing part of the movie is the Mother Paula’s commercial. I can’t tell you how many times someone in our family has quoted the famous line, “Are you a big boy with a big appetite? Then come on down to Mother Paula’s.”

So moral of the story, I did enjoy the movie more than the book. I feel that the movie brought more humor to the story and some handsome leading boys. The book is definitely still worth the read though, the movie just out-shined the book if you ask me.